Search form

Romaine, French Academy Student

"I want everybody to get the opportunity to speak a language. And then everybody would be able to be more confident. It's just a good feeling to have, knowing that you could speak multiple languages, instead of just one... to be able to communicate in more ways than one."

“I'm Romaine, Romaine Ellison. I'm from Brooklyn, New York. In this world, we have to communicate with a lot of people. And not everybody understands English. And I like traveling, so I'm eventually going to travel to other countries where many people don't speak English, so I want to have at least a second language handy to be able to communicate with them.

“I'm a beginner, like I've never spoken a language a day in my life. So coming here and then speaking it and having to speak that language for one full month without referring back to English is kind of difficult and a challenge. And I was willing to accept it.

“My French has definitely gotten better. I can now have conversations with people in French. So I don't have to go back to referring to body language. I can actually communicate using words, and now I actually understand people.

“It's taught me that not everybody is too different from the next person, because we all have struggles, we all have problems we have to deal with. We all have a common way of communicating, even though we're from different parts of the world. We're all similar.

“It's a great feeling to begin to learn something new and then bring it back home and continue to use it, so you can expand on it more and more. After Middlebury, I'm going to want to continue, because it's only a month. So I'm going to continue pursuing the idea of learning French, so I can eventually become fluent.

“I want to try and hopefully convince my school to begin offering another language, specifically French, because nobody in my school speaks another language. So I want everybody to get the opportunity to speak a language.

“It would be great, because everybody will be bilingual. And then everybody would be able to be more confident. It's just a good feeling to have, knowing that you could speak multiple languages, instead of just one. So it's just great to be able to communicate in more ways than one. And it makes you feel good about yourself.”